Former Prime Minister Riad Hijab says relentless fighting against rebels has taken a toll on the Syrian regime. ap

BEIRUT

Syria’s former prime minister, who fled the country last week, said Tuesday in his first public appearance since his defection that the government of President Bashar Assad was crumbling internally under the pressure of relentless fighting against rebels and from betrayals by loyalists who want only to flee.

“Based on my experience and my position, the regime is falling apart morally, materially, economically,” the former official, Riad Hijab, said at a news conference in Amman, Jordan. “Its military is rusting, and it only controls 30 percent of Syria’s territory.”

He added that many high-level civilian and military officials in Syria — “leaders with dignity” — were waiting to defect. Hijab said he fled the Syrian capital, Damascus, because the government had threatened his family and had no reasonable means to end the violence. He also urged the opposition to unify and move ahead with plans for a transitional government and “a civilian democratic state that preserves the right, justice and dignity of all Syrians.”

But he said he had no interest in a formal position with a post-Assad government, should there be one.

“I have sacrificed myself in the campaign of righteousness,” he said. “I don’t want to satisfy anyone but God.”

Hijab’s repudiation of the Assad government was welcomed in the United States, where the Treasury Department removed his name from a blacklist of high Syrian officials whose assets have been frozen by U.S. sanctions. In a statement announcing Hijab’s removal from the blacklist, the Treasury Department said it hoped that other Syrian officials would take “similarly courageous steps to reject the Assad regime and stand with the Syrian people.”

Hijab’s claims about the weakness of the Assad government could not be independently verified, and he gave few details to support his assessment. Hijab, a Sunni technocrat from the eastern city of Deir el-Zour — which has been enduring shelling and fighting for weeks — was not a member of Assad’s inner circle, and he was appointed to the position of prime minister only in June.

But analysts have said that as the highest-level civilian official to defect, he may have had access to reliable internal assessments or government sources. His argument that the government is weakening follows similar descriptions from other defectors, who have suggested that Assad’s grip on power has been loosening even as Syria increasingly becomes the arena for a proxy war, with Iran and Russia assisting the government as Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia funnel military aid to the rebels, supplemented with nonlethal assistance from the United States.